This release marks months of hard work for the young, scrappy, and hungry CLI team, and includes some changes we’ve been hoping to do for literally years. npm@5 takes npm a pretty big step forward, significantly improving its performance in almost all common situations, fixing a bunch of old errors due to the architecture, and just generally making it more robust and fault-tolerant.
Great to see that npm will now – finally! – auto --save by default and generate a package-lock.json file after installing a dependency. They’re two features I felt that were absolutely missing in npm, as the lack of the introduced quite a lot of issues (e.g. colleagues forgetting to save a dependency breaking my code after a pull, deploys going wrong because the server would receive new versions of dependencies, etc.)
And oh, it’s also way faster:
With #npm5 about to come out, I thought I'd update those benchmarks.
Here's the npm5 code I'm working on, vs npm@4.6.1 on a popular repo pic.twitter.com/KWPfbpE46p
— ✨5x gayer Kat✨ (@maybekatz) May 19, 2017
I’d like to think that the “competition” introduced by yarn – which got me very excited – accelerated the release of npm@5 🙂